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Recent Westlaw Announcements

Westlaw Classic will officially be sunsetted in all segments nationwide on July 31, 2015. Westlaw Classic was discontinued in the Academic segment on July 1, 2014. Is there a feature that you will miss from Westlaw Classic that you don’t have on WestlawNext? If so, let me know. We love feedback!

Cloud Delivery Now Available With Dropbox

WestlawNext now allows you to save your files directly into your personal or business Dropbox accounts while researching. You will find Dropbox as an option when you use the document delivery at the top of the legal document you are viewing. Dropbox is a private, cloud storage service offering free and pay subscriptions. A separate subscription is required.

West Academic Online Study Aids

Effective July 1st, the first time a student clicks on the Online Study Aids (SAS) link they will be prompted to setup a West Academic account (example below) and sign in. The account creation process is quick and easy, and a wizard will guide them through the process. This is a one-time process, and when completed, a student will use their OnePass to log into www.lawschool.westlaw.com and seamlessly enter the SAS homepage as they have in the past.

It's good news that Classic is gone for all segments. When it was discontinued for Academic accounts last summer but not for professional accounts, I worried that if an extern or recent graduate was sent to a firm, for example, that was still using Classic, it would be very hard to assist them with research help.

As to the Dropbox integration, I have been using Dropbox to deliver faculty research this spring, and it is a wonderful tool. I love that is has been integrated into Westlaw's functionality.

West Academic recently split from Thomson Reuters, which is the cause of the additional account creation. It sounds like after students create the West Academic account, it should work seamlessly with their OnePass.

The current version of Standard 601(3)(a) was developed during the Comprehensive Review as a method of involving a law library in the process of strategic planning required of a law school. It was envisioned that the planning and assessment taking place for a law school (under what was then Standard 203) would incorporate the work done by the library under this new Standard. To ensure that incorporation, it was decided that a written assessment should be completed by the library. However, when the requirement for strategic planning for a law school was removed during a later phase of the Comprehensive Review, no change was made to the new Standard 601. As a result, the library community has been left…

Law libraries are in the information business. To act as superior guides to this information, we must also be in the people business. We must be concerned with the people who seek our information. And we must be concerned with the people who guide those seekers to the information (i.e., our staff).

Contrary to popular belief, it's not easy to be a staff person in the rigid hierarchy of an academic law library. Particularly at a time when law libraries are facing increased budget pressures that require staff to do much more with much less. This is especially challenging with longtime staff who have seen their jobs change dramatically since they were hired. Many of these folks were not formally trained in librarianship, and they may be resistant to the flexibility needed in today's law library.

Given these challenges, how do we motivate our staff to be the very best guides to our information?

To that end, there was an enlightening program at the AALL Annual Conference in 2013 t…

As we further consider how to train future lawyers for the Algorithmic Society and develop the quality of thinking, listening, relating, collaborating, and learning that will define smartness in this new age, law schools must reach beyond their storied walls.

In law, we must got beyond talking about algorithmic implications to actually help shape algorithmic performance. We need lawyers and programmers to work together to create a sound "machine learning corpus." There's potential for an entirely new subfield to emerge if given the right support. With many law school attached to major research universities, it's a great place to start this cross-pollination and interdisciplinary work.

This type of interdisciplinary work would help to satisfy the career aspirations of advanced-degree seekers but also the wishes of many college presidents, deans, and faculty members who see an interdisciplinary professional education as a path to greater relevance, higher enrollments,…